Well….
What can I say?
I feel like I’ve just bought a ticket for the rollercoaster of fishing and sat in the front seat of the first car!
After the frustration of losing a big perch again last weekend I’ve just had a session that will take some beating, at least in terms of the sheer number of quality fish and I nearly didn’t go after being laid up and spending more time in bed over the last few days than out of it following a nasty chest infection that’s come about from that head cold from hell which reared its ugly head last weekend.
Nonetheless a potter in the garage early this morning revealed that the leftover worm from last weekend was in good nick and with the remainder of the groundbait ready and waiting in the bait freezer, everything seemed set for a session.
Only thing to do was make up a flask of tea and a few sarnies, I wondered about asking Cliff for a recommendation on the sarnies but thought better of it… A-herm
After rocking up around 10 o’clock or about half an hour before Jerry smells the coffee I was in and dibbing away under the rod tip on a very large water with a good six foot up to a steep marginal drop off and the first bite came just after I first lowered in and was chopping feed, in the shape of a 3oz perch which was to be the exception, size wise, for the rest of the day.
Following a short lull after baiting up I went through the “have I killed or cured it” scenario in my head and as I did the dibber just buried so quickly that the rod tip was hooping below the water as I lifted into the fish!
This was no recently spawned out excuse for a hungry mohican either and it gave it a full, chain rattling war grunt before I could get it in the net and after a quick weigh in it went two pounds on the nose…
And that was the pattern of things for the next three hours.
By one o’clock I’d netted seven perch, the smallest (barring the one exception) around 1 3/4lb and three over 2lb but it didn’t end there… Far from it in fact.
Problem was, I was by now having difficulty with the feed as a gusty wind had picked up considerably with waves occasionally lapping at the bank in front of me and hand balling wet chopped worm was now out of the question and so I fashioned a crude but effective pole cup type thingy from a one pint bait tub and a vandalised rod rest head, after making a hole in the side of the bait tub with me scissors I was then able to attach it to my landing net pole and cup it out albeit at a bit of a stretch…
Told you it was crude!
It worked though and the next few hours were pretty frantic with many of the fish taking the bait and bending into the rod as soon as it touched bottom…
It was also clear that a large shoal of very similar sized fish had honed in the feed…
By late afternoon I felt as though I had run riot but as the wind swung more westerly than the preceding southerly the bites slowly ebbed away and I was left struggling with an ultra light 4 x no. 10 dibber that was hanging at a silly angle in the strong tow despite putting 5BB down the line and literally holding the float up under the rod tip and so I decided to experiment and upped the depth by eight inches and threaded over the hook and up the line a 1/2oz bomb which was then stopped with a lightly pinched no.6 shot.
Sure enough, first put in, the float buried and the rod tip was hooping over again as another quality perch made its way to the net although this proved to be the last of the day.
As the rain moved in and seven o’clock approached I decided to call it a day but not after first snatching a stray 6lb Jerry on my improvised dibber/leger rig…
The final tally was twenty nine perch, all but one of them over 1 ¾ lb with seven on, or over, the 2lb mark up to a weight of 2lb 4ozs and, of course, the stray Jerry.
That’ll do me, although I can see I have some work to do in the smallest tench competition
:w
